Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Blogger Image Upload Freeze Workaround

If you find that Blogger/Blogspot often freezes when you are trying to select photos to upload, try this workaround. Open the folder with your photo(s) in Windows Explorer. On the image selection selection screen, instead of clicking on the "Choose File" button, drag the image file from Windows Explorer right on to the "Choose File" button. It will put the filename there and then you can just click the "Upload Image" button.

Discovering this workaround has really saved me a lot of anguish that I had been having trying to upload photos.

This same solution works if your Outlook 2007 is freezing when you try to add attachments.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Unblock a Windows File

Yesterday I downloaded a file and tried to install it on a Windows server. I got the cryptic error message "Windows cannot access the specified device path or file" when I tried to run the exe file. To solve this problem, I needed to right-click on the file and go to Properties. Near the bottom of the dialog, there was a button to "Unblock" the file. After I clicked "Unblock" and "Apply", I was able to run the file. Note, I assume you have to be logged on to the server as administrator in order to unblock a file.

Solution to FTP Problem with Windows Security Settings

I was trying to FTP some files today on to a virtualized Windows 2003 server. First, it would not work in Filezilla. It kept dropping the connection. Then I tried just using the address bar in Windows Explorer (ftp://username:password@ftp.edge-technologies.com/folder/). This didn't work either, but I got a clue into the problem. The following error message would pop up: "Your current security settings do not allow you to download files from this location". The problem was the Internet Explorer download settings were set to a very high level.

I found a workaround, which was to add ftp.edge-technologies.com to my trusted sites and then instead of using Windows Explorer, use Internet Explorer to navigate to ftp://username:password@ftp.edge-technologies.com/. I could then right-click on the items in IE and select "Copy To Folder" which allowed me to them paste them (in Windows Explorer) into the desired folder, at which point it would download the files.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Seagate Replica

I've been using a 2 TB Seagate Replica hard drive for about the last 6 months to back up my laptop. Overall, I am pretty happy with it. Below are a few issues I encountered for anyone who may be searching for solutions for the same issues:

1. A lot of the time it doesn't let me safely disconnect the drive. If I'm pretty sure it's done with the current backup, I unplug it anyway and it works the next time.

2. I only plug in my laptop about once a week to back it up. It would be nice if there was a simple way to disable the "Seagate Replica has not been plugged in for 7 days" nag that always pops up.

3. I was working on a project one day and encountered a file that got unexpectedly reverted to a state where a bunch of my work had been lost. I was able to recover my good version of the file from my Seagate Replica drive, saving me a lot of re-work. The Seagate actually gave me 5 dated versions of the old file to choose from. It was a bit of a pain-in-the-ass getting the file back (it seemed to get slower and slower as I dug deeper into my many sub-directories), but still it was nice to get the file back. So chalk one up to the good guys.

4. There is no documentation anywhere that details how the backups work. For example, what does it do when the drive gets full - delete your oldest versions of your files? And what if you delete a file locally - is it still in your backups? I understand that they don't include a big manual with the drive, but they should at least have this information in a PDF somewhere, or on their website. I guess we'll never know.

5. When I first installed the software, I ran the backup for 4 days, and then it said the backup was complete. But when I looked in the Replica folders, it only had the "My Documents" and "Desktop" folder and did not have back up files from any of the other folders in my c:

drive. I contacted support and they only suggested that I uninstall and reinstall everything. I kept letting it run over the next few days, and after a while it magically started working.

6. [biggest issue] I discovered that the folder C:\Program Files\Seagate Replica\db\ was taking up huge amounts of space on my laptop. And the more files I deleted to clear out space, the more space this folder would take up! The folder had a subfolder {4D9CAEFD-C90F-4E43-9837-14D9B75EA104}, which had many large files in it and was over 16 GB. I could see that each of these files corresponded to dates when I had plugged in the drive and run my backups. I deleted all of the files that were dated older than my current backup, and am still monitoring/testing to see what the effect will be of this.